I met a friend for lunch this afternoon and called his attention to the design of this toilet: The handle and the seat work together to force (men) to lower the seat in order to flush the toilet. I think this is deliberate design (it's an all-gender restroom). My friend thinks it's just an unplanned accident.
We call on you to settle this dispute. Is this a deliberate design or not? You may register your opinion in the poll below. If you have something more to say about this, comments are open as usual.
Forcing men to lower the seat presumes there is something to force them to raise the seat in the first place...
Oh my, "men" who sit to pee ?
Yes, some men (without scare quotes) sit to pee. I worked the last 12 years of my career 320km/200 miles from my home. I lived in rented efficiencies during the work week, and had to clean my own toilet. I learned that the toilet needed much less frequent cleaning if you sit to pee. And the list of things I’d rather be doing than cleaning toilets is long.
Oh well, "scare" quotes if you insist - I just thought they meant 'variations exist' in this context. But I must say that I frequently piss when sitting to do a multi excrete so that I don't have to hold one back to wait for the others - and 'I'm certainly not going to sit down to poop and then get up to pee.
But I haven't particularly noticed a reduced cleaning workload either way.
This is a big thing in Germany. A lot of apartment leases have clauses barring men from standing while pissing into the toilet. They claim a lot of guys have bad aim and will damage the floor. Presumably, this is based on landlord experience.
What kind of toilet floors do they have in German apartments that a bit of piss will "damage" them ?
Oh Lord - a toilet poll?
Who gives a s__t about that?
Did you really have to take this plunge Kevin?
What a "waste"
This place is really going "down the drain"
I know I shouldn't be cracking jokes today - on the day Gilbert Gottfried died at too young an age.............
But thanks anyway.
Gilbert Gottfried's final tweet,
https://i.redd.it/01zne10go5t81.jpg
you (or the possible creative designer) are presuming men who refuse to lower the seat in a mixed gender bathroom are going to be concerned about flushing the toilet. i think that is flawed reasoning.
Too true.
I wonder if men leave the seat up to facilitate the "if it's yellow, let it mellow, if it's brown, flush it down" meme.
That's a feature, not a bug. And the designer was a woman.
Potentially yes, as it would reflect a poor understanding of male behaviour modeled off of female behaviour.
From the photo I have the impression I could make that work without moving the seat down, but then the handle seems really close to the lid so I would probably make contact with the lid in any event which I do not want to do.
Can't someone create a design where you just tap something on the side with your foot to raise and lower the seat, and another thing to tap to flush it? Your shoe is already down there in the muck anyway.
No Time For Sergeants had the raising and lowering with a foot tap part many years ago:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qqg4rJPUxGs
Narrow-width tank isn't standard, at least not in my part of the country. But if you make a narrow tank and design it to use a standard flush mechanism, that's where the handle ends up.
Also, the extended bowl isn't really usual either. A seat for a more standard round bowl might not cover the flush handle when it's raised.
Separable toilet tanks and bowls are often specified separately, with at least two different options for each. This combination just turned out to be dumb.
And kahner is absolutely spot-on about what's going to result.
A toilet manufacturer isn't going to make a toilet model just for gender neutral bathrooms. It does raise the question, however, of why toilet flush handles are always on the left-hand side. The Internet -- well, ok, the Old Farmer's Almanac, which is the first google hit for the search -- claims it's because old toilets had an overhead gravity tank that flushed with a chain that was hung on the left so that someone seated could pull it with their right hand. Makes sense, I guess.
https://www.almanac.com/fact/why-are-toilet-handles-on-the-left-hand
I feel like Uncle John's Bathroom Reader needs to be the go-to on this.
All the shit going down today and Kevin has us taking about shit going down. Must make him giggle.
I would swear I remember seeing some of those overhead tanks with the pull handles on the right side as you face them, so color me skeptical about the almanac. (Besides, the flush from those tanks could be mighty strong and you didn't necessarily want to be sitting down for them.) I'd bet it has more to do with cultural fixtures about the right hand being the clean one.
That, or more likely, leaving room over on the other side for the float-- before Fluidmasters and flapper valves, toilet guts had lots of mechanical stuff. The float that turned off the fill valve needed a lot of space to move up and down unimpeded, and the handle and tackle for the ball valve that flushed the thing would get in the way unless it was on the opposite side. For some reason the fill mechanism has always been on the left side as you face the tank, so the handle had to be on the same side to let the float move freely.
For stuff like this, I think you always have to start by asking what engineers would think most about. In this case, flush and fill mechanisms rate higher than what the toilet looks like or what a user would experience. And once there's a standard placement for things like inlets and handles, you have to stick with it. No different than any other UI, right?
Once the builders pick a side for the cold water connection, that's the side every toilet is going to be built to connect to. In the US, the water supply comes in from the left.
P.S. They do sell right hand flush toilets, but it's more of a specialty thing. If you don't say anything, it's on the left.
Agree about the water connection, and I'd be curious when that became standard-- presumably by the 1920s building boom; my house was built in 1929 and sure enough that's where the supply line is. But how did that become standard? Again presumably because one or some of the many, many toilet manufacturers did it that way and architects, builders (not all houses were architected at the time), carpenters, plumbers, all expected to see that. Maybe it was an explicitly-adopted industry standard of the kind Hoover's Commerce Dept encouraged in the Coolidge administration. In fact that would be my best guess, without actual research.
I don't remember seeing any handles on the right side, but where they are and how they work can vary these days, depending on the mechanisms. I've seen buttons on the side of the tank, but I think only on the left side come to think of it. There are also some toilets with buttons on the lid. The ones I've seen most often are two-stage button pairs for pressure-flush systems and other mechanisms that really are a far cry from the original float-and-ball-valve setups and their direct drop-in replacements.
I leave the seat up in a mixed gender bathroom because if the next user is a man encountering the seat down it's probable that he won't bother to raise it, thus splattering it with pee. That is far worse for a subsequent woman than having to raise a seat.
I learned this from my wife, who always raises the seat after using it to save her sisterhood from this fate. (Unless she knows that she's being followed by a woman).
Tanks get smaller with each successive code change.
People's backsides do not...
The design also hides the handle, possibly discouraging less motivated flushers.
This just looks like lower-volume tank/flush side effect to me.
Source: I've shopped for and installed toilets recently.
I'm really glad I grew up in a household that was 4 females, 2 males. The seat was always down when any of us went into the bathroom.
Why is Big Plumbing trying to cancel men's right to free expression, as shown in their preference to leave toilet seats up?
I believe it's a courtesy to leave the seat up in an all-gender restroom. If it's up, the next guy in to pee won't pee while standing with the seat down, thus splattering it for the following sitter.
Never explain with a conspiracy what can be explained by incompetence.
Tank lid doesn't look flush with the tank. Limit of photo, I guess. Looks like cheap pieces put together badly. I'd expect a purposeful design to look better.
That said, the different parts being aligned that way could be a conscious choice by the GC or plumber, just not the manufacturer.
Making the question of whether a man sits or stands to pee a matter of manhood is an example of toxic masculinity. Lots of older men sit to pee for practical reasons.
Also interesting that there are nearly all male commenters here so no women are providing any input to this question, with a likely male engineer designing things in the first place, which nicely illustrates the problem women face in our society.
If they weren't so cheap, they could have installed a urinal so that the seat could remain down for everyone. I agree that men who don't clean their own bathrooms have no idea which is the better design. And men should think for a moment about how life got arranged so that they could avoid that chore.
I think it probably is deliberate, but some men are such pigs, they just pee on the seat. There's nothing worse than going into a restroom and finding the seat covered in piss.
Or often they just don't flush.
I assure you all that many, many women would not even dream of actually sitting on a public restroom seat - particularly one in gender neutral loo. The amount of spatter found in women only restrooms bears truth to this.
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What, nobody made the mind-boggling obvious point that the lid should _always_ be down and in place _before_ flushing? Don't people know as a matter of course just how unhygienic the alternative is?
Makes me think that the seat up/down wars are more about performative dominance rituals than they are anything else.